Friends are reporting the passing of Harold Farberman, founder of the Conductors’ Guild and formidable champion of the music of Charles Ives.

He was music director of the Colorado Springs Orchestra and the Oakland Symphony Orchestra in the 1960s and 1970s and recorded a London cycle of the Mahler symphonies in the 1990s.

We hear that Nicholas Jenkins, Glyndebourne’s chorus master, has left after just one season.

No announcement has been made. The Gly website now names Matthew Fletcher as acting chorus master.

On a winter weekend, it is impossible to obtain comment or clarification from Glyndebourne.

Nicholas, who arrived from Dutch National Opera, is the second chief to depart abruptly, following the ouster of artistic director Sebastian F. Schwarz, which was likewise unexplained.

We hear that Nicholas left two weeks ago.

From the Lebrecht Album of the Week:

Here’s cause for thanksgiving. The Chicago violinist Rachel Barton Pine has filled an album with music by Black American composers, most of them shamefully little-known. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, for instance, no relation to the British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, but named after him at birth. C-T’s set of blues for solo violin strikes me as having a dual purpose of being truly enjoyable for the listener and perfect warm-up riffs for the player if Bach is too cold to start with on a winter’s morning…..

Read on here.

And here.

From a programme note by Alexander Ramm:

It was a long and at times rough way to the recording of this CD.

A few months before, in winter, I slipped and broke my left elbow. Every second I felt the pins that they inserted into my arm for six months, because Britten’s suites lack any simple bits so that there’s no chance to relax.

The composer’s text demands maximum technical concentration. Eventually, I overcame the discomfort in my left arm and the pricks from the pins stopped preventing me from the things I had to sort out, comprehend and accept in Britten’s thoughts and feelings. I was aware I wouldn’t be the same after this communication with his great music.

The British composer dedicated all the suites to his friend Mstislav Rostropovich. But, if we apply the theory of handshakes, it looks like I’m in Brittens warm musical circle. I was lucky to start to grasp his music in the class of Professor Natalia Nikolayevna Shakhovskaya, one of the Rostropovich’s favourite students. I dedicate this disc to the memory of my dear professor. Natalia Nikolayevna introduced me to a mysterious and expressive musical world filled with drama, complicated moods and feelings, the world of one of the greatest twentieth century composers. This world thrills me and doesn’t let me go.

No comment whatsoever on Chairman humour.

Except it’s really good.